Sundown
by Tolakasa
Summary: Dean has a way to kill The Demon, but at what cost? Spoilers through 2.17, Heart.


**Sundown**

They come to him his last night in New Orleans, when he's just starting to get worried about Dad not answering his phone—a pair of blue-eyed, black-haired, dusky-skinned sisters who appear out of the twilight so suddenly that he nearly shoots them with rock salt, thinking they're ghosts. New Orleans is like that, packed so full of ghosts that you can't always be sure who's living and who's dead, and if there's one thing Dad taught him, it's to shoot first and ask questions later.

Their names are Margret and Marie, and they've come looking for _him_, for Dean Winchester, waiting for a moment when he's alone and not distracted by the job. By dawn Dean's still not entirely sure that they're alive, but what they give him is more important than whether or not they still breathe. (Dad would probably argue about that, but hey, the man hasn't answered his phone in days, so he's not _here_ to argue.) "You are the next guardian," Marie, the shyer one, says, her soft, delicate voice thickened by an accent he doesn't recognize. Not Deep South. Not _quite_ New Orleans. Some flavor of Creole or Cajun, maybe.

"Sweetheart, I don't guard anything."

Margret raises an eyebrow, giving him a _look_. She's sarcastic and flirtatious and hot, and if he was _sure_ she wasn't dead, he would've proposed that they dump her sister and go have some fun hours ago. Not much point in coming to New Orleans for a strictly _business_ trip, after all. "You never guarded your brother?" she asks. "Your father?"

He doesn't ask how they know. Weird is normal for Winchesters.

They have a pair of gifts for him, a matched set like the sisters themselves. Margret gives him the book, an old, falling-apart thing more beaten and battered than Dad's journal. Marie gives him the stoppered vial, carved of chipped gray-and-black stone; when he shakes it experimentally, something liquid sloshes inside.

Before he can ask "What am I supposed to do with these?" the sisters have vanished into the morning fog. Dean shrugs (probably a good thing he _didn't_ ask Margret, 'cause necrophilia? _So_ not his thing) and stuffs book and vial into his duffel, planning to look at them at the next motel.

But Dad never answers his phone, never shows up, it's like he's vanished, so Dean figures if he's supposed to be guarding someone, he'll surprise Sammy and guard him while they look for Dad. It's not until after Jessica is dead and Sam is broken that Dean remembers. That he gets a chance to study the book.

_Book_ isn't quite the right term. It has a cover now, but even that's at least fifty years old, and a lot of the pages inside are older, so brittle that they won't survive being sewn into the spine again, the ink faint and faded. There are at least three alphabets, Greek and Roman and Cyrillic, and he can't recognize all the languages: English and Latin, Spanish and French, Italian and German, something of Russian extraction, a few more that he can't even guess at. He even finds a few characters in the back that the Internet informs him are Korean.

For every old page, there are at least two newer ones in English, translations and notes and a few sketches, babblings about demons and potions and destruction that make no sense. Dean can't believe the sisters gave this to him, or that they expected _him_ to be able to make anything of it. And he can't give it to Sam, because Sam will tell Dad and God only knows what that will do to him.

Because he _can't_ tell Dad.

That was the cost. Margret and Marie had drawn that promise out of him in blood before he knew he was making it, bound him in a bit of spellwork that prevented him from mentioning the book and the vial, even accidentally, to his father. It wasn't John's place to know, they'd said. Never the parent's place. The guardian was always the brother or sister.

Not until Dad tells them the thing that killed Mom was a demon does Dean start seriously studying the book—but only when Sam's asleep or in the shower or off doing reconnaissance. Demons are serious business, and if one's trying to claim Sam, somehow...

Not until after Dad's dead and gone, while they're at Bobby's and he's trying to channel his grief into rebuilding the Impala, does Dean realize what the hell he's got.

There's a way to destroy the demon, capped in that ugly little granite vial, and the book explains how to use it.

It's so easy that it's impossible.

The lies begin to pile up. The lies he told his father still gnaw at his conscience—necessary ones, he knows, but that can't overcome so many years of unquestioning obedience. The lies he tells Sammy are easier—he _had_ to learn to lie to his brother, in order to give him some sense of childhood in the nastiness of the world they grew up in—and have truth in their foundations. He isn't lying in Rivergrove, about the weariness and the burdens, but when the moment comes, he only tells Sam what _Dad_ told him.

In his spare moments, when they're recovering from injuries or looking for a job, when he can hide it from Sam, Dean struggles to decipher more of the book. He's pieced together more of the translations than anybody (except maybe Pastor Jim) would give him credit for, pieced it out of a jumble of prophetic riddles in more languages than he can recognize, spanning more than a thousand years. The more they find out about the demon, the more run-ins they have with it and its children, the more Dean can puzzle out, the more of the text makes _sense_, and the worse the lies become. Margret and Marie had translated a particularly convoluted bit of French into "viral immunity," which makes no sense...until Rivergrove.

Now Dean knows what that means. Knows why Sam didn't catch the disease like everybody else. Playing dumb is one of the hardest things he's ever done, even with years of practice at letting Sam be the smart one. His frustration isn't faked. Neither is his desire to just hide until he can figure things out. He needs time, time to study the book, time to find somebody who can double-check his Greek and Latin and maybe speaks Russian to boot, time to figure out if there's some other poor bastard out there with a brother a demon is trying to steal.

The night Sam runs away, Dean figures out what's in the vial: one of three ingredients for a poison that will kill a demon-touched psychic like Sam, in a way that will cause a magical backlash so severe it will destroy the demon. No ordinary death will do it; he can't just shoot Sam like Dad intended. That won't accomplish anything. If the notes in the back of the book are accurate, that might not even kill him _at all_, now that his powers are active.

It takes everything he has not to spit that in Gordon's face, to tell him that all the grenades in the world might just piss Sam off. He kinda hopes it does, because it'll be worth all the mental agony of these last few days to watch Sam beat the crap out of Gordon's self-righteous ass.

He almost tells Sammy then. But Sam's worried about Ava and they rush to Peoria to find her, and find only the mutilated corpse of her fiancé.

He almost tells Sammy in that haunted hotel, watching Sam torture himself bothers him that much, but Sam's wasted and he wouldn't believe Dean anyway.

Almost. There's nearly as many almosts as there are lies, now.

Maybe he deserves the pummeling he takes when Meg possesses Sam. A year ago, she'd've never managed. Dean would have spotted the signs from the start, rather than panicking over Sam's disappearance.

They leave San Francisco, Sam silent and lost in his pain—not as bad as after Jessica, of course, but there's a sharper, more desperate edge to this; Madison's situation struck too close to home. Plus Sam views lots of things differently than Dean does, and Dean's reasonably sure Sam's never had to kill a lover.

He has, not that he'd tell Sam that. Wouldn't help either one of them, and it'd just make Sam think he was even more of a monster. He can't afford to have Sam not trusting him. Not now. Not with the book and the vial burning a hole in his bag, and secrets burning holes in his heart.

They stop—somewhere, he doesn't even bother noticing the town's name. He pretends to sleep, but as soon as Sam's fallen asleep he's back at the table, studying the book, rereading passages he has memorized until he can't take it anymore and he winds up sitting there watching Sammy sleep.

So easy.

So impossible.

He has all the stuff to make the poison right here in this room: all it needs is salt and blood. Dean's blood, not Sam's. It's the brother's responsibility. Always has been.

He's not the first. He won't be the last. It's all part of a cycle no hunter ever sees until it's too late, until he's trapped in it, a cycle that repeats in centuries.

_My sister begged me to kill her today, for the demons in her head were growing too strong to be ignored. I mixed the potion and gave to her to drink, and watched her die. The sky became black, the world became empty, as if God Himself had left us. There is only despair. _

_I am placing this book in safety beneath the altar stone at Salisbury, for I cannot live with what I have done._

The book holds the accounts of at least five such deaths—always one sibling killing another; brothers and sisters in every possible combination except twins. Not only does the sibling have to donate blood, he also has to mix the damn stuff with a certain incantation, and it has a lifespan of maybe ten minutes. He can't make out all the technical Latin of the theories, but it has something to do with the power of the sibling bond.

And after every entry, there's one by the survivor, and never another one in that handwriting again. Dean has no doubt what that means.

His brother can't survive the demon, and Dean can't survive his own guilt if he kills him.

_Save Sammy._

Except there's no saving Sammy. There never was. Sam is bound to the demon, in ways that even the _demon_ probably doesn't understand, and Dean is bound to Sam. The only way to kill the demon is to kill Sam with the potion in the vial, and the only person who can mix the damn stuff is Dean.

Kill his brother.

Kill _Sammy._

He dozes off over the book, and comes awake to find a line of Latin right at eye level, a line about demons and angels that suddenly makes sense. The potion won't kill _the_ demon. It will kill _all_ demons. And all angels. And possibly every other supernatural thing on the fucking planet.

Angels. Sammy's angels. _Mom's_ angels.

_The world became empty._

A year ago, that wouldn't have made him so much as blink; the only thing he would have cared about was Sam. But his world's not black-and-white, good-and-evil anymore. There's gray and scarlet and gold both demonic and angelic, making things harder.

This isn't a decision he should be making by himself. This is Sam's decision too. Maybe more his than anybody's. Maybe Margret and Marie just gave Dean the book and the vial because they had no way of getting to Sam.

He can't make himself believe that. No matter how he tries.

He's still awake when sunlight begins poking through the worn spots in the drapes. Sam stirs, mumbling something as he wakes. _Of all the brothers in the world, I get the morning person._

"Dean?" Sam asks, squinting blearily at him. "You up already?" He sits up. "Did you even sleep?"

"No."

"Why not?" He asks that like Dean's actually going to answer. Like he _can_ answer. "Dean, you okay?"

Dean takes a deep breath. "Sammy, there's something I've gotta tell you."

_**the end**_


End file.
